Closed and open endings in short fiction

Milton Crane's outdated anthology, 50 Great Short Stories, from 1952!, shows its age in Crane's selection of early 20th-century stories. The 20th century, and modern age in literature, moved away from the tightly plotted stories of previous years. To be fair, Crane includes a few stories from some of the great Modern writers, notably Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, but far too many pieces in this collection depend on a "surprise ending" or a conclusion w/ a wry twist. Three I read yesterday are examples: Frank O'Connor's The Man of the House, about a young man in early 20th century Ireland, living w/ his mother in a state of poverty (this story anticipates the work of Frank McCourt and to a much lesser extent William Trevor), who is sent to buy medicine for his mother, consumes the whole bottle, but that is pardoned by mother, now feeling much better, which he takes to be the miracle he'd prayed for; Edmund Wilson's The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles (Wilson was a giant of 20th-century lit crit, less well known for his stories), a well written piece about the eponymous man (title an homage to DH Lawrence?) who builds a business selling canned turtle soup and is shot to death by a biz partner - who escapes blame when another employee runs away for unrelated reasons but vows he will tell the truth and take the blame if the runaway is ever caught and charged; and The Giocanda Smile, by Aldous Huxley, famous of course for Brave New World, a somewhat long story about a philanderer who gets what he deserves - each of these stories is well-crafted and ends with a tight wrap that concludes everything, and each feels quite different from, say, the Three Day Blow, which I read and posted on a few days back and which ends with a sense of mystery, longing, and openness.